The Taste of Night (40 page)

“So when do we start?” I asked, shifting again.

“Now.”

“Now?” Joaquin repeated, still numbed by the Tulpa’s hostility.

“Now,” I said, and my left arm ratcheted down as my right leg whipped out, a perfectly timed sidekick containing all the momentum I could muster from a motionless position. I caught Joaquin in the side of the head and he crumpled, out before he’d even hit the floor.

The Tulpa laughed. “I assume that was for the
afraid
remark.”

“Among other things,” I said dryly.

My hand shifted to my conduit, but the Tulpa shook his head, making a
tsk
ing sound. “Not until you’re out of the building. Until then, I suggest you use your lead wisely. He won’t be out for long.”

I didn’t have to be told twice. I ran, taking the stairs two at a time. He was right, I thought, bursting through the stairwell door. I’d use my lead to find Ian, secure the vial, and save the known world. Murdering Joaquin could wait a little longer.

The Tulpa let me have my head start, but he didn’t make it easy on me. I exploded into the casino and shot for the front entrance as quickly as my legs would take me. It wasn’t as precarious a trip as it would’ve been had the casino been packed, but I still had to dodge geriatric gamblers and jaded cocktail waitresses while careening past slot banks, all of which nearly slowed me down to a mortal’s pace. A woman running helter-skelter through a casino would’ve caught attention in any case, but I’d had the feeling of being watched from the moment I stepped back on the tacky carpeting, and my guess was that the Tulpa’s telepathic skills extended to mortals. Two Valhalla guards—not Shadows, just guards—were waiting for me as I whipped through the lobby, and another pair stood at the ready, guarding the front exit.

I dodged the first, ignoring their yells as they fell in behind me, and if I’d been darting down the fifty-yard line, I’d have been home free. The second pair were more of a worry.

They expected me to dodge, or alter my direction. Instead I ducked, barreling directly into the first man’s legs, flip
ping him over the top of me with the force of my momentum. Releasing him, I palmed the ground and swept the second guard’s legs out from under him as he came at me. Then I gained my feet and burst through the front doors, rounding a corner to press myself against the outside wall, and tried to look casual. The dozen or so people waiting in the taxi queue stared.

I smiled back as I sniffed at the air, which was too still to catch more than a skein of Ian’s scent, but I determined it led north, back into the center of town. I filled my lungs and blew south. Then I waited.

“Your wig’s crooked,” a helpful onlooker said.

I straightened it as sound erupted behind me. Joaquin appeared seconds later, and as predicted, swung south. I raised my conduit and shot. He stepped forward, and the arrow whizzed past him. Somebody screamed. Joaquin put a hand to his ear—just clipped, dammit—and whirled my way as I raced forward. I caught him with a kick to his solar plexus, and spun to plant my right elbow in the center of his face. He went down again as hands grabbed me from behind.

Time for some girly moves. I rammed my heel into the foot of one guard, then nailed him in the temple, and when his grip slipped, spun to grasp the neck of the other. I had time to register the surprise on his face before my knee came up, his head went down, and he joined his partner in la-la land. Then, before any more backup could arrive, I ran, and this time I didn’t stop.

Dodging the sirens already screaming toward Valhalla, I abandoned the main thoroughfares for little-used roadways where rock and bramble sprouted up between potholes and busted-out streetlights. At one point, when I sensed I was getting closer to Ian, but with no clear passageway to the other side of Flamingo Road, I had to skirt two chain-link fences and run along the freeway, car horns honking as they blew by me in the opposite direction.

When I finally reached the corner of Tumaric and Pollack
Street, the desperate terror infusing Ian’s pheromones was so strong I could practically see it. The olfactory trail broke off at an abandoned warehouse framed in concrete and chipped pink stucco, accessible by only one door.

“I know this place,” I whispered, circling it twice just to make sure this was it, while drawing my conduit. I’d seen it before, but more, I sensed it. A psychic smear blanketed the building like a mental chalk outline. It was thin now, the kill spot tinny with age, but the hereditary thread of the one killed here was well known to me. “Stryker.”

Was this a deliberate choice by the Tulpa? Did the location have some increased meaning or power, because Stryker died here? Or because it had been Joaquin who’d killed him? Or was it just a random building, useful because it was both central and abandoned, and nothing more nefarious than that?

I sighed. Sometimes it sucked being the new superhero on the block.

Still, super is as super does, so I kicked in the steel-plated door and ducked aside as it crashed to the ground, waiting for gunfire, booby traps, or whatever else the Tulpa had tucked in there along with Ian. The silence deafened. Not even an alarm to cut through the night. “Ian?”

Still nothing. I was sure he was in there…but if he was dead, if those leaky, fearful pheromones were phantom scents, I was going to be pissed. And heartsick. The Tulpa would know that, I thought with a sick twinge.

“Ian,” I tried again. “It’s me! Olivia!”

A scratch of movement, and if whimpers could sound hopeful, this one did. “O-Olivia?”

I sighed in relief. “Is anyone in there with you?”

“No. No, they left me alone.” His voice raised an octave. “I’ve been here for hours. Please help me.”

“I will, Ian. Just tell me…are there any alarms that you can see? Booby traps? Cages?”

“No, nothing. Just me, and I’m tied up. Please hurry.”

Well, you’d think I’d do just that, wouldn’t you? After all,
I was the one who’d gotten Ian captured, kidnapped, and trussed up like a sow at the county fair. But just because it sounded like a nerdy computer geek, and smelled like one—and presumably looked like one—didn’t mean it was necessarily so. Just because he said there were no agents waiting to ensnare me didn’t mean they weren’t there.

I took a deep breath and peered through the doorway. The dim interior matched the nightscape outside, so I didn’t need time for my eyes to adjust. I stared, then stared harder, before tilting my head wonderingly. “How clever.”

Besides a cement floor, concrete walls, and a steel-beamed ceiling dotted with shattered and tilted light fixtures, the building was entirely empty. Ian sat dwarfed in a room a quarter the size of a football field, hunched in a steel chair that must have lost its comfort about half a second after he’d been tied there. They hadn’t gagged him, knowing nobody would hear his cries on a lonely night in a warehouse the city had all but forgotten. His face was tear-streaked, eyes wild as he looked at me from behind shattered glasses, and his shirt bloodied from a fat lip. And tousled wouldn’t even begin to describe his hair. I had to get him out of here before Joaquin arrived.

But first I had to make sure this was really Ian. “Name the event you were supposed to compete in this weekend.”

“You’re not Olivia,” he said slowly.

“Oh,” I unpinned the red wig from my head, tossing it in a corner as I smoothed back the wisps of blond, sweaty hair that had escaped from my bun. “See?”

He started screaming for me to get him out of there, rattling the chair’s screwed-in base with his bound hands and feet, head upturned like a baby bird’s in the nest. He had about as much chance of getting free like that as I had of being the next Mrs. Brad Pitt.

“Answer the question first,” I told him, raising my voice to be heard over the racket. “What’s the marathon called?”

He snuffled a few times, and calmed down enough to ask why.

“Because I have to make sure you are who you say you
are.”

“Olivia—” he protested, and I lifted my conduit, pointing it at his forehead. He stuttered off into silence, and the smell of urine immediately joined the nervous sweat. Which answered that question.

“Sorry,” I said, tucking the weapon at the small of my back. I used the light from the horizontal windows ratcheting the roofline to guide me as I hurried toward Ian. Frankly, I was already thinking of all the ways I’d make Warren eat crow when I returned to the boneyard with the cure for the virus. I’d just decided to go easy on the old guy when the world erupted in a flash of light and I was tossed backward, sparks singeing off my skin as I landed so squarely on my ass, the concrete reverberated up my spine. There was a shimmer in the air, like water flowing between two sheets of glass, and a single rectangular panel appeared before me like it’d been conjured from nothing. Twice my height, both vertically and horizontally, I didn’t have to touch it again to know it was impenetrable. Gradually the glimmering lessened, and half a minute later it was invisible again.

But it was still there.

“Fuck,” I muttered, rubbing my ass, and that was a sincere understatement. The Tulpa’s maze was here, intact, and Ian—seemingly a mere two hundred yards away from me—was at the center of it.

“What
was
that?” Ian said, eyes still fixed on the spot where the wall had appeared.

“Not was. Is. That’s your cage, honey,” I said, backing up to study the layout. As much as one can study an invisible force, that is. Ian’s bindings were just for show. The real hurdle was in getting to him, and I was sure the Tulpa had gotten a charge, literally, out of my running up against his mental minefield. “So that’s his game.”

Now I was sure Joaquin had done something to piss off the Tulpa. Because dear ol’ Dad, fond of intricate puzzles and mental games, was playing with both of us. Hopefully that would unnerve Joaquin enough to have him second-
guessing himself into fatal distraction. Even so, I still had to get in…and there was no telling how many electrified walls I had to touch just to find the entrance.

Deadly to the player who enters but doesn’t exit
, Hunter had said, talking of this maze. And I’d stepped into the game the minute I ran out of Valhalla. Question was, how would I make my way to Ian without getting zapped with enough volts to power a small city? The first jolt still hummed in my brain like a hive. And how would I get a mortal out of this thing without frying him like butter on a griddle?

“You jump,” Hunter said, when I called him on my cell phone and gave him the condensed version of events. The urgency in my voice must have convinced him not to waste time questioning me.

“Jump,” I repeated, as visions of green-faced children winging through the air popped into my mind.

“Just keep your legs together so when you land you don’t straddle a wall and get the ride of your life.” He paused, before adding. “By default, that is.”

“Glad you can joke at a time like this.”

“Was I joking?” he deadpanned. “Besides, I’m just trying to keep you loose. Relax, okay? And focus. Remember, sight is your least valuable tool. Try to tap into your sixth sense.”

Focus, I thought, and took a deep breath. That’s what Tekla had repeated during our sessions together—the need for clarity of mind, the harnessing of intention. Never mind that I’d never managed to break down even one of her glass walls. I swallowed hard. “You stay on the line, okay? I might need you to—”

“Talk you through it?” he finished, when I couldn’t. I nodded, realized he couldn’t see it, and made an affirmative noise. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to die alone.

The sound of feet pounding across asphalt kept me from getting too self-reflective. I whipped out my conduit, fired an arrow through the open doorway, heard a halting scuttle, and fired a second shot just to buy myself a little more time.
Turning back, I spoke into the phone. “Hold on.”

Intention, inshmention—I just leaped. I expected the up-swing to be just fine, and was already bracing for the fall when I slammed facefirst against a barrier a good thirty feet in the air. The blow knocked me back another ten, and as I dropped, my legs ricocheted off a second wall, flinging me backward so I landed on my spine. I came to a stop against yet another wall, and scuttled away from it as its jarring power combined with the previous two. I felt like an electrified pinball.

The commotion, of course, brought Joaquin sprinting inside.

“Ah. The maze,” he said, looking at the three panels my graceless flight had lit up. He didn’t sound surprised or impressed. That couldn’t be good. I kept my eyes on him—once they could focus again—and as he sauntered to the right his mouth moved like he was counting, and he paced in steady, measured steps.

No, I thought again, that couldn’t be good at all.

I closed my eyes, and cursed, because I suddenly knew exactly what the Tulpa was doing.

If she can be killed by the likes of you, I don’t want her
.

Those words alone should’ve told me he wasn’t just going to give me a head start and let me waltz away with the cure for the virus. Nope, every time I touched one of these walls my power and energy were sucked back into the maze. Back, I thought, into the Tulpa. No wonder he hadn’t killed me. My power would’ve reverted to my mother, just like Stryker’s had reverted to Tekla. Our lineage was matriarchal…but this way he could claim it for himself.

Ian, meanwhile, had begun screaming again at the sight of Joaquin, words pouring over one another as tears and sweat rolled down his face. I tried to shush him, to let him know he was only fueling Joaquin’s ego with his fear, but he was too panicked to listen. Not that I blamed him.

Joaquin finished his pacing and halted with his hands on
his hips, regarding Ian sourly. “What a pussy.”

I shot him a look of pure hatred as I gained my feet, steady despite wobbly knees, and checked my phone long enough to determine my connection with Hunter had gone dead when I hit the electrified barriers. “Well, what do you expect when you kidnap him, beat his face to shit, and tie him up?” I said, tossing the phone to the ground.

“But I didn’t beat him at all, did I, Ian?” He blew Ian a kiss. The crying escalated. “No, I was real sweet to your boyfriend. In fact, after he decoded your computer for me, we had ourselves a real nice party. Didn’t we, honey?”

Ian whimpered again, and this time I made out what he said.
Don’t hurt me anymore
.

“You rancid bastard.”

Joaquin smiled my way. “A couple more minutes and I’ll let you say that to my face.”

And he stepped forward, counting again. I didn’t need a wall to light up to know he’d entered the maze. Panic must have shown on my face because Joaquin’s eyes remained fixated on me as he counted off five paces, before pivoting left as he spoke again. “He always starts on the right.”

And he face-planted into a stinging sheet of balled energy. I’d have laughed as his eyes rolled into his skull, except my own had probably resembled slot reels only seconds before. The energy pulled from Joaquin into the maze zipped like a current through the rest of the walls, and I followed it with my head as it crackled past me, realizing I could track it to move another few feet either way without getting zapped. Question was, which way was forward and which way was back?